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Posts Tagged ‘Mother’

It is not an easy thing to lose your mother. Once, when I was three, I lost my mother in a grocery store. I remember looking at a row of canned food and then looking up for my mother, and she was gone. She was there and then she was not. I can’t tell you how I felt at that moment because there are no words adequate for the feeling a three-year-old has at the loss of her mother. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to get any easier with age.

For the past year or so now, I have felt that three-year-old curled up inside of me crying inconsolably, “I want my mommy.” I do, too. I want my mommy. I want her so bad, and I can’t find her anymore. And, this time, she’s not looking for me.

When I go to her house, I open her drawers and find things arranged just as she left them. Her neat, little address book tucked away in a drawer with her pens and pencils and envelopes. I read the entries in her address book written in the neatest handwriting you have ever seen. Some addresses or phone numbers carefully erased with new ones penciled in. I try to find the most recent changes. I realize what seems like yesterday was actually several years ago. My mother. Always so neat and organized. I feel like I am peering into a time capsule. Like I am being ricocheted back and forth in time. Just a few years in time, but seemingly a lifetime apart.

I run, crying out for my mother, but she is not there. She was just there a minute ago. I just looked away, and she was gone. Somebody help me find my mother. I want my mother. I want her now. I run up and down the wide aisles, and I can’t find her anywhere. She is not rearranging her pantry. She is not busy decorating a wedding cake. She is not sitting quietly on the couch tatting. She’s not sitting at the dining room table carefully writing a letter to an old friend. She’s not out in the yard talking across the fence to a neighbor. She’s not bringing the clothes in from out on the line or ironing shirts or watering her plants…

When I was five, I watched my mother leave me. I was the oldest of her four children, and we all had pneumonia while my father was away on a business trip. When he came home, she told him that she couldn’t take it anymore, and she was leaving. And she left. I watched her from the kitchen window as she walked down the side street and away from our house. Away from me. I don’t know where she went. I don’t remember when she returned.

I’m looking out that same window now. I know where my mother is going. I know she won’t be returning to me. I want to cry out and bang on the glass, but she is too far away now.

About Me

Hi, I'm Gail!

I'm a recently retired homeschooling mother of two. Well, technically I haven't retired from being a mother, and truthfully I'm not even sure I have officially retired from homeschooling.
I homeschooled my girls, Lily and Clara, over sixteen years using Charlotte Mason's educational methods and the free Ambleside Online curriculum. Lily graduated in May of 2010 and Clara graduated in May of 2013. They are now both attending college far, far away from home.
I am now watching two little girls in my home, so I get to once again explore the world anew.
"All grown-ups were children first. (But few remember it)." -Antoine de Saint-Exupéry